Customer Reviews

Leisure

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I bought Bill Owens 'Suburbia' in 1973 and over the years it has come to be one of my favorite photobooks (I also bought the 1999 reprint for the extra photos) the clarity of both the images and the thoughts behind them just seemed perfect. His 'Working (I Do It For The Money)' was my next buy and the vision continued and now with 'Lesiure' I have three of the four Suburbia series.

Unfortunately I feel that this book lacks some of the clarity of the other two I have. It seems to me that the neg files have been scoured for any photos that show leisure and then tipped into these pages. Most of the images work but that only shows up the ones that I feel are out of place (though still showing leisure) for instance, the couple by their pool on page twenty-seven, another couple, not communicating, on page seventy-six or the lady riding a bike on page ninety-one, they just seem out of place and look as if they might have been taken by another photographer. Several other photos seem badly cropped or peripheral to the books concept of leisure. Another annoyance, admittedly minor, is that so many of the photos have no captions even though they show something that makes me ask "What's going on here?"

Despite this the production of the book is first-class, good paper and printing (175 dpi) and the same size as the 'Suburbia' reprint. Perhaps the publishers will re-issue 'Our Kind of People' and 'Working' in this format to complete Bill Owens celebration of American life from the recent past.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

I saw a collection of Bill Owens images from this book at the ICP a while back. All of the images were wonderfully amusing tales of what folk do for leisure. After seeing the collection, I had to purchase the book and was pleasantly suprised by the book's production quality and the wide range of images. It's fun to see what people would do with their free time and money. I also like the captions as many of them are witty and are helpful in explaining the purpose of the image. For some reason, there isn't a caption on every page, but many of the pages do have a caption.

This book is a lot of fun. Bill Owens takes the picture, you get to make up the story that goes with it. The photo on the cover is one of my favorites. I've got some time, so here's my story for it:

The guy making hamburgers is not very successful (although this fact has mostly escaped him). In fact, he still lives with his now-retired parents. Here they are again in Yosemite. (They go every September - after the crowds leave.) Once again he's making the burgers ("Tommy always has made the best burgers.") His parents look from behind with forced smiles. If he could only find a nice girl...